Today when I was online, I found this story that I think everyone should make a point to read. If you don't have the time, I'll highlight a few few points.

Quote:

Then she started cutting up vegetables for dinner. She had a serrated vegetable knife with a blade about seven inches long. She turned around and she stabbed at me.

"I tried to block it, but I was surprised. I was off balance...the knife went right through my collar and gave me a little nick on my neck.

"She reared back to stab me again. I tried to block it again...I hit her in the mouth. She dropped the knife, ran to the telephone, called 911, and told them, 'My husband is hitting me! I think he's gonna kill me.'

Quote:

David says there's a double standard when it comes to charging men. "Now, isn't that strange? When she had a fat lip, it was a felony and I was going to jail. But when they finally realized that she tried to stab me in the neck, it stopped being a crime, and instead it was a mental health issue."

Quote:

Woods, a former construction worker, suffered disabling work-related injuries early in his marriage. He says:
"The violence really began in our family about 10 days after Ruth realized that she had all the power [financially]. I knew I had to get my kids out. I called the largest domestic violence shelter agency in Sacramento County several times. They told me, 'Men are perpetrators of domestic violence; women are victims of domestic violence,' and hung up.

I'm wondering what everyone thinks about this clear double standard in how we treat domestic violence. Men aren't acknowledged as victims, only women are, and its led to incredibly dangerous situations. There was a study included that says about half of the time women are abusers and 70% of the time, women are the first to strike. Also, their attacks tend to involve weapons more often and are surprise attacks. How come with this information, we still find it hard to believe that women can be as violent, if not more so, than men? How come there aren't more services provided to men? How come all abuse lines only acknowledge women as victims?

For those of you who don't know, I lived with an abuser up until two years ago. The abuser was my step-mother, who attempted to smother my father, stab him, and eventually attacked me for defending him while she was sending him into having a heart attack. In the 12+ years of abuse I dealt with, she had a habit of attacking my father, then when he defended himself, she called the police and claimed he was beating her. When the police arrived, it didn't matter what you said, he was dragged away. When they finally realized she was the perpetrator(and, coincidentally, she was mentally ill), they never once arrested her. They actually frequently left her in the house with us even though she was out of control. Never once in this time did we receive assistance until finally I filed a report against her. They didn't believe my father, they thought he was automatically an abuser because he's a man. How could the law be so lacking in its practices that with abuse it now arrests first and asks questions later?

It can be pretty da.mn infuriating, but to change this standard is going to be very hard. What I don't understand is that while men will usually just use their fists or words, women will grab the nearest blunt or sharp object to hurt somebody with - and they're only called mentally unstable!

That helpline that man called needs to be shut down; what would they do if a teenage boy called, being abused by his mother or another female family member? Would they turn him away too?

I stare at the girl in the mirror: T-shirt, torn up jeans, no beauty queen.
But the way that you see me, you get underneath me, and all my defenses just fall away, fall away.
I am beautiful with you, even in the darkest part of me. I am beautiful with you;
Make it feel the way it's supposed to be!

You're here with me: Just show me this and I'll believe I am beautiful with you!

Agreed. The courts actually usually just push to get them mental health treatment(it happened to us) instead of pushing jail time. They even put her on probation only when she started stalking us, which was ridiculous because if any man did what she did, they would've been in jail for attempted murder, child abuse, harassment, etc etc. She was just charged with "assault". End discussion, nothing more, nothing less. We just got some info from the DA that the lone harassment charge(and there was over 10) finally resulted in 1 years probation, even though it violated her assault probation. Total BS.

Apparently most helplines do that. I know shelters around my home do the same thing. They actually took in my stepmother after she ran from the cops and they treated her like the victim. They even were trying to help her get acquitted. At least this man lucked out, he sued the state and they now require there to be services to help male victims as well and these groups have to accomodate them too.

Depends. Over 16, he's not really considered a child anymore, so they might just assume he's lieing. I do wonder about that. I've found that most of these groups have a flat out hatred against all males even though not all males are abusers.

Reading this thread, too, has made me start wondering if a lot of reported cases of women being abused by men are actually women ABUSING the men and not the other way around. :\

I stare at the girl in the mirror: T-shirt, torn up jeans, no beauty queen.
But the way that you see me, you get underneath me, and all my defenses just fall away, fall away.
I am beautiful with you, even in the darkest part of me. I am beautiful with you;
Make it feel the way it's supposed to be!

You're here with me: Just show me this and I'll believe I am beautiful with you!

I agree. They kind of act like there's a cut off age for young men between abused and abuser. If they're over 18 most of the time, people consider them the abuser, and not the abused.

I know that feeling, though, with an abusive parent. Maybe not to the extent of most, but there are times when my mother gets like that. She threw a plate at my brother one - and it could have hit him in the neck and done a lot of damage. She's also throw other stuff, like pens, books, basically anything she had with her. She's always the first to attack, even if it's just a threat of an attack, and then she always tries to put the blame on my father, or me in some cases. I'm a little headstrong, so that leads to me getting into a lot of fights with my mum, be it verbal or physical. And, of course, she's a woman so she's been told to be "mentally unstable" and is treated almost like the victim. Just yesterday, before I went to bed, I got into a fight with her. I wanted to go outside to take a breather, so I sat on the deck. She started screaming for my dad to come help, and threatened to call the cops on me and for them to take me away. So, I went inside and tried to go to my room but she wouldn't leave me alone, so I pushed her out of my room. Then she started threatening to beat the door down and before I had gotten her out of my room, it looked like she wanted to strangle me, or something. She can't remember anything that happened last night, so I do think it has something to do with mental stability (and the fact that I think she was high on sleeping pills that night), but still...

My mum has actually threatened my dad before with a knife, but she claims she was doing it for "self defense" when my dad did nothing whatsoever, except maybe make a little comment. Then this one time, I was buttering my toast with a BUTTER KNIFE, and I turned to her because she was talking to me, and she flipped out. I was like, "It's just a butter knife..." and then she went and told the rest of my family that I threatened her with a knife. o_o

Maybe people just don't want to believe that women are abusers too. In my opinion, it seems like anti-feminism when a woman doesn't get treated the same as men do. In this case it's not a good thing to be treated that way, but it should still be equal...

I'm not saying I want my mum to be in jail, because I think she is just mentally unstable, but I just don't agree with the double standard. But how are we supposed to fix it without putting cameras all over our homes? Society doesn't makes sense sometimes...

EDIT: This kind of reminds me of the Chris Brown/Rhianna thing. Maybe she had the first strike, or something. Still, I'm not saying theres an excuse for what he did to her... >.>

Agreed. It feels like we're stuck in this spiral where nothing can really change. I'd say the key is education, which there is very little of to begin with. I remember in my criminology class in high school, my teacher actually taught that usually men abuse women. I was the only one who objected to it because of my experience and everyone attacked me and claimed my father must be weak because of it. It was sad really and completely uncalled for.

I know the knife thing. When my stepmother tried to stab my father, she actually told the police that she was "showing him the knife". This was funny because in the recording(my father wisened up in the last few weeks and recorded her all of the time because he figured we would have to run for it), she threw the knife at him while screaming at him. You can hear it hit the wall and the dog freak out as a scuffle broke out over it. Most terrifying thing I've ever heard. They did nothing about it though because she was "mentally unstable". I don't deny that fact, but that was just flat out abuse in my opinion because she was being treated and had been for years. Its sad that she got away with such extreme things simply because of society's attitude towards domestic violence.

Double standard crap just doesn't happen in Ireland. Or if it does, very rarely.

There are a few reasons for this, including:

1: In ancient gaelic society, women and men where equal in all respects. Women warriors could swing axes at annoying invaders as well as any man, and we had both Kings and queens, and they could rule independently.

There's also the fact that there is a lot of violence in g@y couples, but police won't often take it seriously cuz they think that two women wouldn't fight and a guy should be able to fight off another guy. But it doesn't work that way.